Toon Boom Digital Pro

A complete animation studio that draws frames in 2D and places them in a 3D scene

Toon Boom Digital Pro is a 2D paperless animation studio, although you can place your 2D animations in a 3D environment. And if you want to work with paper, you can do that too.

Put simply, it combines tools for designing and drawing the frames involved in 2D animation with the compositing tools needed to place them in a 3D scene and animate them using keyframing as well as inverse kinematics, lipsyncing, image substitution and morphing. In fact, it contains everything you need to create pro cartoons right up to film resolution.

Toon Boom isn’t cheap and it’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s a complex package with plenty to learn and workflows that are derived from hand-drawn cell animation rather than from digital design. You’ll probably get on better with it if you’re from a traditional animation background rather than an After Effects background. There is, however, an extensive package of tutorials, videos and information to get you going as a new user, and the actual workflows are sensible.

To turn a drawing into an animatable character, you simply need to define bones, and how they’re connected, and your character will be distorted with them. To create lipsync you simply define the mouth shapes and Toon Boom will analyse your sound files and create an automatic animation.

This isn’t a massive update, but there are some significant alterations. You now do all your work in the same view, so you don’t have to keep switching between modes. Character inverse kinematics have been improved, as have onion-skinning modes, but this doesn’t amount to a major overhaul.

You can now work on images of up to 10k. This might seem a lot, since HD is only 1,920 pixels across. However, in 2D animation, it’s quite common to create backgrounds much larger than your frame size – that way you can zoom into them, scroll and pan around without losing detail.

Toon Boom is a complete package, but does it need to be? Many artists will prefer to use their own drawing tools (whether they be software packages or traditional media) to produce their artwork, then bring it into Toon Boom for animation. That said, even as simply an animator, it’s a powerful tool.

If you do a little 2D animation, After Effects will cover your needs, or perhaps one of the cut-down versions of Toon Boom. If you do a lot – particularly character animation – Toon Boom beats it on bones animation and lipsyncing, and it’s much better at working with vector-drawn artwork.